Device-aware Adaptation of Websites

Abstract: The use of handheld devices such as smart phones and tablets have exploded in the last few years. These mobile devices differ from regular desktops by having limited battery power, processing power, bandwidth, internal memory, and screen size. With many device types and with mobile adaptation being done in many ways, it is therefore important for websites to adapt to mobile users. This thesis characterise how websites currently are adapting to mobile devices. For our analysis and data collection, we created a tool which sends modified HTTP GET requests that makes the web server believe the GET requests were sent from a smart phone, tablet, or a regular desktop. Another tool then captured all the HTTP packets and let us analyse these for each platform. We chose to analyse the top 500 most popular websites in the world and the top 100 websites from 15 different categories fetched directly from www.alexa.com. Among other things, we observed that of the total HTTP objects fetched to render an average website, mobile or non-mobile, more than half of the objects were images. Another conclusion is that a website fetched by an iPhone 4 device is more heavily reduced in amount of images than a Nexus 7.